News

iTunes Ping goes live on iOS 4, not yet iPad

By Jeremy Horwitz ● Wednesday, September 1, 2010

In addition to the release of iTunes 10 for Mac and PC earlier this evening, Apple has brought the Ping social music networking feature to the free iTunes application for iPhone and iPod touch. Rather than offering Ping as a standalone application, the company has integrated most of its features into a button that’s now found at the bottom of iTunes, using button-style tabs to let you switch between a timeline of Activity, lists of People you follow and who follow you, plus Profile, which contains a seemingly non-editable version of the profile you create with the desktop application.

Notably, the Ping button does not appear as of yet in the iPad version of iTunes, and may not do so until the November release of iOS 4.2.

Comments

1

Tell me the button bar is still configurable and that I can remove this Ping nonsense from it. Why do I need (yet another) “social network,” and why does it have to be in my music?

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on September 2, 2010 at 11:02 AM (CDT)

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When does the ping appear on the bottom bar? I was hooked to itunes last night, and got no update to the iphone 4, and I don’t have the ping button today.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on September 2, 2010 at 11:22 AM (CDT)

1

So this might be a stupid question but I’m genuinely curious—how did Ping appear in the iTunes app without my having to update it or install iOS 4.1? It just appeared by itself, automatically… but how? And does this mean that any app has this ability?

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on September 2, 2010 at 12:55 PM (CDT)

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@ttman21 , @Farnsworth It appears in the iTunes Store app, not iPod.

@gouged the iTunes store app just pulls in web-based content from Apple. It doesn’t need a software update to change.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on September 2, 2010 at 3:10 PM (CDT)

1

I’ve not downloaded iTunes 10 yet. I used to use the LaLa.com service quite a bit as it was an awesome way for me to discover new music, especially when my chosen genre of music is just not available in the typical mainstream or “Top-40”. The closest would be Disturbed or Iron Maiden. After all, what is the likely I’ll see Kamelot or Sonata Arctica on mainstream FM radio? Anway, even though I pretty much ignored the whole social network thing (despite much badgering from friends, I still refuse to sign up on Facebook, for example), but I did like LaLa quite a bit, even to the point that I had some 10,000 tracks, nearly all power and progressive metal (sorry, but I just simply cannot stand rap or hip-hop, nor do I do country), uploaded to the service for streaming. I found all kinds of awesome new music on there as a result as recommendations by “followers” and those that I “followed”. Therefore, I am curious as to what Apple ultimately did with Lala, as I am quite certain that this whole Ping thing was a result of Apple buying out LaLa.com.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on September 2, 2010 at 11:13 PM (CDT)

1

Finally, I find an article explaining that the iPad does not yet have Ping. I searched expecting it to be there of course. How weird that it would not be on the iPad of all things. Even weirder that Apple does not explain anywhere that iPad owners have to wait. Anyhow, thanks for finally answering my question….

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on September 6, 2010 at 10:14 AM (CDT)

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Apple is relying on iOS 4, and even iOS 4.1 in some cases, to implement these new features. The iPad is of course still running iOS 3.2, so it’s being left out in the cold for now.

TV Show Rentals are another new feature that isn’t yet supported on the iPad, either.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on September 6, 2010 at 11:46 AM (CDT)

1

@UncoolJohn

I can understand that insofar as getting the content/data but how does it know to appear as a button in the button bar with regular iOS SDK UI elements? Aren’t these in the Objective-C iOS SDK and would need to be added in the app as code and compiled, etc to show up?

For example, this seems to imply that it’s possible to just write an app without any interface at all and then just pull in stuff from the web that creates the entire interface (buttons, textboxes, everything) including functionality? This is what this Ping addition to iTunes app seems like it did so it sounds like you can bypass Apple approval process using this method then?

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on September 8, 2010 at 6:38 PM (CDT)